On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 03:51:28PM -0400, Dan Lanciani wrote: > |> |The networking world is an anomaly. Everywhere else we have > |> |usage-based pricing (except in a few mediocre restaurants where they > |> |offer all-you-can-eat prices). The grocery store doesn't charge you > |> |a flat rate. The water company doesn't charge you a flat rate. The > |> |electric company doesn't charge flat-rate. > |> > |> I think you left out the utility that is most analogous to networking, though. > |> Most every residential telephone service offers at least one flavor of flat > |> rate plan. The plan I have covers most of my state. Long distance companies > |> are starting to offer flat-rate plans as well. So it isn't clear that the > |> networking world is really an anomaly among its peers. > | > |Mapping from wired services to wireless is not straight forward. > > Umm, the offered analogy to electric service was also wired. I merely > presented what I consider a more relevant wired analogy. But wireless > phone providers also offer flat-rate plans, so your distinction really > isn't...
And moreso, in the WirelessWAN environment I'm specifically talking about, it's even *less* so -- most of the others are circuit-switched; idle but connected calls consume much heaver weight resources (a physical channel vs. a network connection control block in the memory of a couple machines). Packet switching is about as cooperative an environment as you're going to get for flat-rating -- the incremental overhead is so much lighter. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
